Traffic Duplication: A treacherous threat might reach you this year!

A new impending hitch in the world of programmatic advertising: traffic duplication. The practice of traffic duplication is neither prohibited nor banned! For advertisers to feel relaxed along with a hike in their ad spend on mobile, there is an urgent need towards greater transparency in this sector. It is very necessary to avert this kind of malpractices that obscure the consequences and reduces the level of trust between advertisers and ad dealers.

The authentic mobile ad-buying supply chain ought to work like this; publishers define their available inventory to a single ad exchange, then auction it off to many possible purchasers or buyers denoted by demand-side platforms (DSPs). The endearing DSP successively serves an ad to the end user. Certainly, those who are on the demand side have the most to lose, since they will reimburse the higher rates and see more traffic, however without an additional inventory. Nevertheless, traffic duplication is an industrywide dispute that disturbs everyone.

The bid duplication of traffic represents a single user as two distinct users. Thus, eliminating the restrictions created by cap ads served in line with the advertisers’ requirements. A sole app will send an ad request to more than one exchange! Now, each exchange has its own identification system for naming those applications and will have a diverse unique name for each app. Although this doesn’t fall into the classification of ad fraud because this process is not illegitimate or illegal, however, bid duplication has introduced an extremely undesirable inefficiency.

The repetition of ad requests also adds to the general dormancy in the ad ecosystem. If all this duplication of an ad takes five seconds to load, it creates a poor customer experience and it is very time-consuming. These are the major reasons behind ad blocking by so many users.

There is one major solution to this traffic duplication, i.e. we need to re-establish the matter of trust in all parties involved in the buying and selling of the mobile ads along with great transparency. Transparency will let all the companies to make better decisions on which traffic to drop or buy while also digging out behaviors that do not carry values to the market. Improved efficiency and augmented trust will not obtain overheads for companies that function transparently. Rather, improved practices will enhance the level of trust and stability in an industry that will last forever.